One of the few touristy things we did in Nashville was visit their full-scale replica of the Parthenon. The Nashville version was built in 1897 as part of the city's Centennial Exposition. It was originally meant to be a temporary structure, but was restored beginning in the 1920s to the permanent building that exists today.
I visited once on a family vacation when I was growing up, but didn't really remember much about it. Since then, they've added an enormous statue of Athena inside the main chamber.
Around the perimeter are casts from some of the marble statuary from the original Parthenon.
They also have scale models of the statuary from the outside of the building.
If you click the photo, you can see more detail of the artwork. There's mesh all around the statuary to keep these guys from nesting there (the pigeons, not the gryphons or the gargoyles):
Nashville's Parthenon is the only full-scale model of the building in the world. Pretty cool, huh?
I had no idea. Wow.
Posted by: laurie | May 05, 2009 at 11:25 PM